UK Book Buyers Switching to Digital & Spending Less

Bowker released some results of a survey earlier today, and the data raised some questions about the growth of the UK ebook market. The key takeaways are:

Book buyers spent 6% less on paper books in 2011 than they did in 2010

Ebook buyers spent 3% less in 2011 than they did in 2010

The number of paper books dropped by 4%, while the number of ebooks purchased increased by 0.3%

Kids & senior citizens are buying more ebooks while the ages in between are buying less

Ebooks went from 2.8% of purchases in December 2010 to 12.5% in November 2011

Average price paid for ebooks increased (see chart at right)

What's really interesting about the data is that I was under the impression that the UK ebook market grew last year by some noticeable amount. But if you look at the numbers above, it shrank. Consumers are reporting that they spent less. They're buying a very slightly larger number of ebooks than before, but they're spending less.

I'm going to hold out for more data before I jump to any conclusions. Bowker plans to release the rest of the results at their conference in London in March, and once that data is in hand then I will try to figure it out.

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Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

Always remember the old rule of gigo (garbage in garbage out) in such studies. Stats for self publishers are missing in action & all I’ve seen are guesses, though http://ebookcomments.blogspot.com/ has got some interesting charts for the months of 2011, suggesting selfpublishing could be almost one-third of ebook market unit sales.